Florida criminal justice reporting project – Juvenile Justice Information Exchangehttps://jjie.org
Juvenile Justice News for People Who Care About Children and the LawFri, 13 Sep 2019 18:36:55 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.11In Florida, Fees, Fines From Felonies Means Disenfranchisedhttps://jjie.org/2019/08/28/in-florida-fees-fines-from-felonies-means-disenfranchised/
https://jjie.org/2019/08/28/in-florida-fees-fines-from-felonies-means-disenfranchised/#commentsWed, 28 Aug 2019 13:00:54 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=961559Ten years ago, Rosemary McCoy never would have imagined that today she’d be in a Jacksonville library, tears streaming down her face, as she tells a stranger how it feels to...

]]>[Reporter Claire Goforth will be interviewed about this article on WJCT-FM at 9 a.m. on Sept. 26.]

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Ten years ago, Rosemary McCoy never would have imagined that today she’d be in a Jacksonville library, tears streaming down her face, as she tells a stranger how it feels to be disenfranchised.

Then she was a real estate professional with two decades’ experience, a wife, mother of two, an average, everyday citizen living a good life.

Today she scrapes by on meager wages earned collecting petition signatures. Thanks to felony convictions in 2015 on charges associated with renting homes without authorization, the 61-year-old’s former life is long gone. So are her voting rights.

Adding to her sense of injustice, McCoy was among those who gathered signatures to get Florida’s Amendment 4 on the ballot in 2018, which automatically restored voting rights to people with felony convictions (except murder and sex offenses) who have completed their sentences. When it passed, she was among the 1.4 million Floridians who believed they’d be able to vote.

Initially this was true. In April, she registered to vote. McCoy cast a ballot in Jacksonville’s municipal elections the following month.

Then the legislature enacted a law it claimed was necessary to interpret Amendment 4. That law, Senate Bill 7066, which passed strictly on party lines with Republicans for it and Democrats against, interprets “completion of sentence” to include payment of court fees, fines and restitution, or legal financial obligations (LFOs).

McCoy owes a little more than $7,000 in restitution. With an income of barely minimum wage, she may as well owe 10 times that amount.

Because of that debt, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7066 on the Friday before Independence Day, he took back her right to vote.

Rosemary McCoy is not alone. In fact, of the 1.4 million Floridians estimated to have been re-enfranchised when Amendment 4 passed overwhelmingly last November, as many as 80% were disenfranchised by that stroke of the governor’s pen.

Fines and fees vary widely

McCoy’s debt is associated with restitution. Most would likely believe that restitution is straightforward, but tracking it is far more complicated than one might expect. As theMiami Herald reported, restitution differs by jurisdiction and even by judge. Sometimes court clerks collect; sometimes victims do. During imprisonment or probation, the Department of Corrections collects restitution. After probation, it’s often converted to a civil lien; then payments go to the clerk, the victim or a debt collector.

The state has no idea how much restitution is owed cumulatively, by whom and to whom. There is no state agency tasked with tracking the data. Many defendants themselves don’t know how much they owe.

Micah Kubic

Florida is among the states that charges often exorbitant fines to people convicted of crimes and civil infractions. Several estimates have found that roughly a million Floridians with felony convictions have court debt. Some owe hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They can appeal to convert it to community service hours, but McCoy points out that this typically requires hiring a lawyer with money that they just don’t have.

And now that debt also prohibits them from voting.

Tampa native Aranda Lister, 38, was convicted of trafficking and conspiracy to traffic amphetamine in 2004. While her co-defendant husband went to prison; she was sentenced to supervised drug probation. The court also ordered her to pay $57,000 in fines and fees.

For years, Lister ran herself ragged trying to support their three small children and pay her court debt, at times working multiple jobs earning menial wages typical at places that hire people with records. And her debt kept growing due to probation, drug screening and other charges.

“By the time it was over with, I racked up $10,000 [in additional fees] on a 48-month sentence,” she said. “… and I was behind, of course I was behind, I’ve got three kids.”

Eventually, Lister returned to crime. “I resorted to going back to selling drugs. It’s quicker money. It helps me to sit back for a minute and take a breath.”

She got busted in 2017 for constructive possession (legal ownership) of less than .2 grams of amphetamine. This time, she went to prison for a little more than a year. That charge netted her another $1,800 in fines and fees. “I went and paid my debt to society for 13.8 months and I still have to pay to go to prison,” she said.

Lister was released on July 17. Now she’s a client ofOperation New Hope in Jacksonville, a nonprofit that provides job and skills training and other services to people with criminal records.

She still owes more than $53,000 for the 2004 charge, a sum she is not likely to be able to pay off at her part-time job with an event staffing agency.

A first-degree felony for raping a minor, meanwhile, will net a maximum $10,000 fine.

“We also have fees and fines that are completely inappropriate, especially in the context of Amendment 4,” Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes said. For example, getting convicted of stealing a single fish from an aquaculture facility, a misdemeanor, has a mandatory $10,000 fine, which a person who steals one fish is probably unable to pay, he said.

“What’s the purpose of this fine?” he said.

Jeremy Wright, 31, has been in and out of the system for years, most recently for grand theft auto that he pled down to misdemeanor trespassing. He thinks fees and fines give people little choice but to reoffend. “It feels like entrapment. ’Cause how else are we going to get the money, especially the type of money they’re asking for, without going out and breaking the law?” he said.

Funding courts on defendants’ backs

For many years, few appreciated the significance of the fees and fines collected by the court system, or of their impact on those caught up in it.

Amendment 4 brought the issue into sharp focus, said Ashley Thomas,Florida state director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. SB 7066 not only shone a spotlight on what is known — the exorbitance and inconsistency of fees and fines — but what is not known.

At a recent press briefing, ACLU regional organizer Sam Coodley said that half a billion dollars of LFOs is owed in Palm Beach County alone, which means that Floridians probably owe many billions of dollars cumulatively. But no one is sure how many owe, and how much, not even the state.

“The fact that no one knows, no one knows how much is owed, is a pretty damning indictment of the legislature,” said ACLU of Florida Executive Director Micah Kubic at the briefing.

Even individuals may not know how much they owe. Coodley pointed to the case of Clifford Tyson, a plaintiff in ACLU’ssuit challenging SB 7066. Three different agencies in Hillsborough County have records of Tyson’s court debt; each gives a different amount owed.

University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith prepared areport analyzing the effect of SB 7066 on behalf of the ACLU. Based on court clerks’ data from 48 counties, he found that 82.4% of 375,256 people with felony records owe LFOs, rendering them ineligible to vote. If this ratio bears out across all 1.4 million Floridians with felony convictions who couldn’t vote before Amendment 4, then 1.15 million were disenfranchised by SB 7066.

“The public was unaware that this was happening to us. The public honestly thought that once you completed your sentence, it was over,” McCoy said. “They believed that all your rights would be restored.”

The ACLU is finding “enormous racial disparities” among those who still owe LFOs, Coodley said. “In some counties white people were twice as likely to have paid their fees,” he said. This means that black people are more likely to be disenfranchised due to LFOs.

There may also be debt on the books that’s decades old, following around people who have no idea that it’s owed. No one is sure.

What is clear is that fees and fines are big money. Last fiscal year, the court system collected $864 million,Florida Courts and Comptrollers reports. The Fines and Fees Justice Centerreports that more than a billion dollars — $688 million in fines and $474 million in fees — was ordered. Of this, $298 million was unpaid.

So what happens to the unpaid LFOs? After 90 days, it can begin accruing interest in the form of a statutorily authorized surcharge of up to 40%. Some call this a “poverty penalty.” Clerks can collect or they can send the debt to private collections agencies. Advocates note that these agencies spend thousands in campaign donations and to lobby lawmakers.

The collection rate for all court debt (including that previously owed) was 74.25% last year, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center. For civil traffic cases ($388 million in 2018), the collection rate was 91.93%. For other categories of offenses, the rate was much lower. Felonies’ collection rate was 20.55%; juvenile offenses 26.6%. Some classes of felonies, such as drug trafficking, have such a low collection rate that the debt is largely seen as uncollectible, Thomas said, which for some calls into question the fine’s purpose.

Fees are more consistent, but still burdensome and complicated.

Thefee schedule reads like a manual in nickel and diming. A first-degree misdemeanor traffic charge, which carries a fine of up to $1,000 regardless of whether the defendant has been found guilty, could also include: a 5% surcharge on the fine, $17 for the crime stoppers trust fund, $3 for the crime stoppers fee, $50 in additional court costs, $10 for the clerk of court trust fund, $1 crimes compensation fee, $49 for the crimes compensationtrust fund, $3 additional court cost clearing, $2 for local law enforcement education (mandatory with ordinance), $20 crimes prevention fund, $3 state radio system surcharge, $30 for the court facilities fund (mandatory with ordinance) and $65 in additional costs (mandatory with ordinance); for a grand total of up to $1,303, more than 30% higher than the fine itself.

McCoy’s conviction included $616 in case fees, plus $50 for the application for public defender. Among many complaints about Florida’s fees is that it does not waive public defender application fees for indigents.

Then there are the fees that come with probation and other terms of release.

In 1999, Roderick Pough, 57, was sentenced to 24 years for selling and possessing cocaine under Florida’s habitual offender law. He was released on July 18 of this year. After 20 years in prison, he still hesitates to make eye contact; his demeanor is subdued and thoughtful. On Aug. 6, his probation officer handed him a $2,335 bill. Monthly payments of $64.48 come due in September. He was stunned.

“I’m already hit with bills that I can’t afford. How can I afford it? I don’t have [a] job. They don’t care. It’s got to be done. You’re basically telling me you’re going to send me back to prison,” Pough, an Operation New Hope client, said.

He was particularly disappointed in DeSantis, whom he encouraged people to vote for.

“He said he was going to do something about prison reform. So why do I got all these fines? I thought I did 20 years in prison. Why I gotta come out and pay all this money?”

The debate surrounding SB 7066 inspired Sen. Brandes to seek, and ultimately get, funding to study fees and fines. The goal is to not only quantify but also understand why the state began requiring the fees and fines in the first place. Why, for instance, do some of the fines from a boating under the influence conviction go to the brain and spinal cord injury rehabilitation trust fund? Why are life and other felonies’ fines discretionary, but DUI fines mandatory?

“The goal really is to understand the rationale … to try to understand the overall vision and try to understand the correlation between, what is the purpose of this penalty,” he said.

The study is also intended to help the legislature improve consistency in future years, Brandes said.

“[We’re] trying to find a cohesive process by which we establish these fines and we try to hold them up to some common light to say this makes sense,” he said.

How did we get here?

Every year, Florida courts collect hundreds of millions of dollars, in what’s called “cash register justice.” But it wasn’t always this way. In the past there were court costs, and, in some cases, fines associated with civil and criminal violations. The 1980s drug war caused governments to feel the budgetary pinch of the rapidly burgeoning criminal justice system, said Thomas of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. Concurrently, the nation became ever more tax-averse.

In 1998 Florida landed on a solution: People who use the court system should pay to operate it. That year, the state passed a constitutional amendment mandating that fines and fees from civil and criminal defendants fund the court system. It went into effect in 2004.

Since then, fees and fines have grown exponentially. In addition to adding scores of fees like the 15-cent charge in juvenile cases, the legislature has vastly expanded the categories of offenses that include fines. Today, more than 100 carry a fine. A few are discretionary; most are mandatory. Drug charges carry some of the highest fines, which arguably makes some sense in light of the drug war’s role in increasing courts’ costs. However, given new understanding of addiction, many wonder if it still makes sense to even incarcerate drug users. Three of the four former inmates interviewed for this article have had drug charges.

Today the fees and fines fund not just the court system, but a whole lot more.

Last fiscal year, when the court system collected $864 million, the statewide judicial branch budget was $539 million. The remaining $325 million gets divided among numerous entities.

“They also fund EMS, law libraries, or various trust funds. They’re a way to fund a lot of different beneficial government programs but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with criminal justice,” Thomas said.

Some of the money also goes to the state. “They use fines and fees to plug budget holes,” Brandes said. There’s not much resistance in the legislature to upping a fine or fee, he said. “It’s the shortest punt.”

Both Lister and Wright agree with requiring restitution, but to them incarceration is punishment enough. They were appalled to learn that Florida essentially taxes defendants, largely because it provides so little to help former defendants become productive again. Both wondered if the state is going to fine them, why doesn’t it use that money to help them? Instead, last year, Floridacut $28 million from prison mental health, substance abuse and reentry programs. Lister said she had a Narcotics Anonymous meeting once in nearly 14 months in prison.

Upon release, unless they find a program like Operation New Hope, former inmates have little chance of breaking the cycle. Florida gives newly released prisoners $50 and a bus ticket and sends them on their way.

“What are you gonna do?” Lister asked. “You gonna eat and have somewhere to sleep? Are you going to sleep outside? Or are you going to pay fines? It keeps us down.”

Pough said, “I’m a four-time loser. But that don’t mean I can’t get my life right. That don’t mean I can’t change. I can change. I want to change. I’m ready to change.”

As fines have risen, the number of cases filed and cleared in Florida courts has drastically decreased in the last decade. From2008 to 2017, county court filings decreased 23% (dispositions 27%); circuit court filings 36% (dispositions 25%).

“In keeping with national trends, Florida’s county courts experienced pronounced declines in misdemeanor filings from 2007 to 2015; the declines are largely due to fewer arrests and increased diversionary methods,” theFlorida State Court Annual Report for the fiscal year 2017-18 states.

Disenfranchised by poverty

Poor people and minorities are more likely to be charged and convicted of crime. Black people comprise 17% of Florida’s population and nearly half of its prison population.

Court debt takes on new significance in light of the approximately 3 million Floridians living in poverty, according toU.S. Census Bureau andWelfare Info data. Adding further depth to the issue is the fact that there are significantly higher poverty rates among minorities. With a statewide poverty rate of 15.1%; nearly 25% of black people and 20% of Hispanics live in poverty, Welfare Info reports.

McCoy wept as she talked about losing her voting rights. She is among those who see racism in SB 7066. To her, it harks back to the Jim Crow era, calling to mind her mother, who died last year at 103.

“It just took me back to the struggle that she went through. Here it is 2019 and I’m going through the same thing that she went through,” she said.

The SB 7066 debate centers primarily on the definition of “sentence.” Some view it as completing incarceration, probation and parole; others as doing that plus paying fees, fines, restitution, etc.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is in the former camp. The civil rights organization has filed one of several suits challenging SB 7066 as unnecessary and beyond the scope of the amendment. McCoy is one of the plaintiffs. The SPLC and others have likened it to a poll tax. Poll taxes, voting fees used in the Jim Crow era to disenfranchise African Americans, do bear some similarity to Florida’s current system.

Promotion for the amendment frequently cited 1.4 million people getting their voting rights restored; SB 7066 reduced that figure to potentially fewer than 300,000.

Nancy Abudu

“The discrepancy of the numbers in and of themselves suggests that the legislature knew that the bill was counter to what voters were supporting,” said Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for voting rights with SPLC.

On Aug. 9, DeSantis requested an advisory opinion from the Florida Supreme Court about “whether ‘completion of all terms of sentence’ encompasses financial obligations, such as fines, fees and restitution.” Inthe letter, the governor referenced Amendment 4 co-author Jon Mills, who also served as advocates’ counsel, testifying before the Florida Supreme Court during a hearing concerning putting on the ballot the sentence that included LFOs.

Desmond Meade, executive director of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), one of the amendment’s standard-bearers, said that Amendment 4 is functioning as intended, even taking SB 7066 into consideration.

“Amendment 4’s primary purpose was not to attack fees and fines,” he said, later adding. “What Amendment 4 did is give people another way to get to vote.”

Meade said he understands why some people view it as a poll tax and admitted to being among those caught unaware by the scope of the issue, but said, “That’s an entirely different argument that needs to be answered elsewhere.”

FRRC is raising funds to help people pay LFOs excluding restitution. Details are still being hammered out, but Meade said they expect to require applicants to have already paid restitution, demonstrate financial need and that they’re serious about making a positive change. The program could make an enormous impact for people impacted by LFOs.

“I wish somebody would take these fines and give me some help paying,” Pough said. “… I don’t want to go back to prison. I’m not trying to go back to prison. I ain’t going in no drug holes. I done changed my friends. Just give me a chance to live. That’s all I ask.”

Florida state Rep. Al Jacquet, a Democrat, has proposed legislation that would overturn SB 7066. It has little chance of passing the Republican-dominated legislature. Even if it did, DeSantis could easily veto it.

Rosemary McCoy isn’t giving up.

“This is a democracy and we will always fight for it. We’ve been fighting for it, and until this world give up the ghost, we’re going to continue to fight for it. I just want the public to know, don’t give up,” she said.

This project was collaboratively produced with Jaxlookout and underwritten in part by The Vital Projects Fund.

]]>I sit at my desk wondering why they don’t get it. Why do our legislators continue to do nothing to help hurting children and hurting families?

Since 2009 more than 13,000 children have been prosecuted as adults in Florida. Florida prosecutes more children as adults for felonies than any other state and we give this incredibly powerful decision-making to the prosecutor, not a judge.

In 2017-18 there were 904 children who were sent to the adult criminal justice system. This was a slight decrease from the 1,128 children who were sent to the adult criminal justice system in 2016-17, according to the state Department of Juvenile Justice. On top of that, the data shows that of these children, more than three out of every four who were transferred to the adult system were either African American or Hispanic.

Denise Rock

Our prosecutors charge more children as adults for felonies than anywhere else in the country. Judges can’t review or challenge these decisions. This process is called “direct file,” which means a child is taken from a juvenile center and placed into the adult system.

Once a prosecutor has charged a child as an adult, the judge must accept what the prosecutor decided. The prosecutor has immunity from wrongful prosecution, meaning nothing can happen to them for being overzealous in their job prosecuting a child as an adult who really needed counseling and support services offered in the juvenile system, not the adult system.

For the last six years Democratic state Sen. Bobby Powell has sponsored a bill that would limit the direct filing of children into the adult justice system. This year that bill was SB 876 (HB 575 by Democratic Rep. James Bush was the House companion bill) but again it died in session and was not passed. What a shame.

Another bill that would have helped our children was SB 870, which would house children who are prosecuted as adults in juvenile facilities instead of adult jail as they await trial. Judges would have discretion to order youth to be housed elsewhere if the situation poses a threat to the security or safety of other children in the facility, or if the child requests to be detained elsewhere.

And yet a third bill that was introduced to help children that went nowhere: SB 850 and HB 339, which eliminates mandatory transfer to adult court. This bill would have eliminated the ability to charge a child younger than 14 as an adult and would have prohibited direct file of 14- and 15-year-olds into the adult justice system. This bill would have also eliminated mandatory transfer of 16- and 17-year-olds for any crime and limited the discretionary transfer to only the most serious crimes, such as murder or manslaughter.

So, let me get this straight, we don’t allow children under 18 to buy alcohol or cigarettes, we don’t allow children under 18 to watch an R-rated movie but we will send them to an adult jail or prison? We don’t allow them to serve on juries, join the military or enter a legal contract, but we will place them into an adult jail or prison? Does that make any sense to you?

Legislature has more work to do

Clearly, we understand that the human brain of a child is not the same as an adult, yet our legislators continue to allow prosecutors who are nothing more than people hired to do a job to decide the direction of a child’s future rather than a judge. A judge is an impartial party, not a prosecutor.

The adult system is not prepared to deal with the unique needs of juveniles, including education and counseling services.

We should let a judge, not a prosecutor, decide which court is more appropriate for a child and require the judge to explain the court’s decision in writing. The judge would consider factors such as a child’s age and maturity, history of trauma, level of participation in the offense and whether the child and community would be better served if the case were handled in the juvenile or adult system.

I’ve personally witnessed children over and over suffer the cruel and harsh effects of being placed into an adult system. I’ve watched some of my clients who are charged as juveniles enter the adult system only to be confined to a cell alone, in isolation, prevented from being able to access the phone to talk to their mom, for example.

While we sincerely appreciate the real effort the Senate made this year to help do better for our kids and our communities (particularly Sens. Jeff Brandes, a Republican; Randolph Bracy, a Democrat; Rob Bradley, a Republican; Joe Gruters, a Republican; Keith Perry, a Republican; Powell and Darryl Rouson, a Democrat), we hope their colleagues will listen and do more to pass meaningful reforms in 2020.

It’s time to do better for kids and our communities. It’s just the right thing to do.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/08/07/florida-must-stop-letting-prosecutors-charge-children-as-adults/feed/3How Youth Voices Can Help Us Keep Kids Away From the Juvenile Justice Systemhttps://jjie.org/2019/07/31/how-youth-voices-can-help-us-keep-kids-away-from-the-juvenile-justice-system/
https://jjie.org/2019/07/31/how-youth-voices-can-help-us-keep-kids-away-from-the-juvenile-justice-system/#respondWed, 31 Jul 2019 18:36:01 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=947039Statistics recently released by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice illustrate a grim reality for the outcomes of most individuals who have ever gone through the juvenile court system as teens or even younger.

]]>Statistics recently released by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice illustrate a grim reality for the outcomes of most individuals who have ever gone through the juvenile court system as teens or even younger. Not only are they far more likely to be incarcerated again than adults, with recidivism rates for young offenders reaching as high as 84%, but they are also significantly more prone to experiencing poverty even if they do not return. Sadly, it makes sense why.

These youth, mere children who are still in the process of finding themselves, are catapulted back into society after being imprisoned for years at a time, and our juvenile justice system leaves it up to them to somehow rehabilitate themselves. Not to mention that they are expected to do this having already missed out on the opportunity to get an education or receive vocational training, things many employers require, during the span of their detention.

Factors like these, combined with our juvenile justice system’s lack of reintegration programs and support services, are what create this perpetual cycle of release and re-incarceration that ensnares so many at-risk youth, one that is nearly impossible to stop once it has begun.

However, what we also know is that most kids’ first contact with the juvenile justice system begins in school, with as much as 462 in-school arrests being made each year in certain Florida counties. So what if, instead of attempting to reform what is already a hopelessly broken juvenile justice system, we work to prevent students from ever reaching the back of that police cruiser in the first place via in-school intervention?

That’s where Hear the Youth comes in. Having started in one of the worst schools within one of the most dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods in Jacksonville, otherwise known as “the murder capital of Florida,” we are no strangers to these problems. In fact, as minorities, we are almost five times more likely to experience the kinds of encounters with the juvenile justice system I have just described.

Listen to teens

However, that is exactly what makes us different, for unlike countless other organizations that have tried and failed to address this issue, we are operated entirely by young people who have experienced the juvenile justice system firsthand, just like those who it is our mission to help. This allows us to bring authentic voices from real teens to the table and connect them with school officials to create genuine change in our education system.

Brandon Griggs

From meeting with the superintendent of Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) to discuss the need for more empathetic policing practices to holding school board members accountable for the correlation between Jacksonville’s extremely high illiteracy and incarceration rates, we began to realize that our voices were some of the most powerful instruments out there for bringing attention to these often-neglected issues that teens face.

Soon, these conversations grew into wider-scale town hall-style meetings between hundreds of youth and local officials, expanding our impact citywide. Now, as a result of our efforts, DCPS is introducing new school board policies that would provide resources to accommodate at-risk students who are more prone to engage in crime because of their lack of support. In addition, Chartwells has committed to returning once each quarter to evaluate student lunch concerns, something that is essential for many of the teens whose families can’t afford to provide meals for them, driving these kids to steal the food they need.

However, despite all that we have accomplished, I think it is more important for us to realize the broader lesson to be learned from this: When we allow people who have experienced things like violence, crime and poverty firsthand to lead our reform efforts, we can effectively create change: people like myself, and the many other students (who should otherwise have ended up dead or incarcerated according to the statistic) who helped found this project as a means of putting the juvenile in juvenile justice.

So the next time you see a problem in your community, don’t wait for it to reach the desk of your state or local representatives. Take action on it now, because while you may not have much “experience” in the traditional sense, you know far more than anyone else about the things that impact youth and what we should be doing about them.

To get involved, contact me on Twitter: @Brandon92782914or become an activist in your own community by becoming active locally and attending community meetings to raise awareness for what you are passionate about.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/07/31/how-youth-voices-can-help-us-keep-kids-away-from-the-juvenile-justice-system/feed/0Florida in Debate Over Murder Charges for Drug Dealers Whose Buyers Diehttps://jjie.org/2019/07/29/florida-considers-murder-charge-for-drug-dealers/
https://jjie.org/2019/07/29/florida-considers-murder-charge-for-drug-dealers/#respondMon, 29 Jul 2019 13:00:26 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=944486The move from Ohio to Florida was supposed to be a new beginning. On June 29, 2018, Timothy Sexton wrote on Facebook that he was nervous and excited to start his new...

]]>JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The move from Ohio to Florida was supposed to be a new beginning. On June 29, 2018, Timothy Sexton wrote on Facebook that he was nervous and excited to start his new job in Jacksonville. Though he’d miss his girlfriend and young son, who planned to join him in a few weeks, he wrote, “it’s what’s best for my family, and I.”

But the move turned out to be anything but the happy beginning the young father dreamed of. A little more than a month later, on Aug. 5, Sexton was dead at 26. The medical examiner found the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl in his system. He was discovered in a car outside the house where he was staying.

Timothy Sexton

Under a controversial Florida law passed unanimously by the legislature in 2017, his death was immediately investigated as a murder.

A witness gave police the street name of the dealer who allegedly sold Sexton drugs the night before he was found. Jacksonville police quickly arranged two undercover buys from the suspect, Deonte “Black boi” Wadley; on Aug. 15, he was arrested, then charged with selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school.

On March 21, a grand jury in the Fourth Circuit returned an indictment against Wadley for first-degree murder resulting from distribution of a controlled substance — fentanyl.

While other states have only relatively recently added drug-induced homicide laws to the books, Florida did so at the height of the drug war in 1982. Dealers can even be sentenced to death. (The state is not seeking death in this case. Wadley instead faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.)

In the more than 30 years since, drug dealers in Florida have rarely, if ever, been convicted of first-degree murder for selling a lethal dose.

The Florida Legislature added fentanyl to the list of substances that provide the grounds for such charges in October 2017. Since then, a handful of cases invoking the law have been filed around the state.

Deonte Wadley

No fentanyl dealers are facing a possible death sentence now. But with prosecutors under intense pressure to combat the opioid epidemic through any means possible, it may be only a matter of time before one is.

The harshness of the law remains controversial, however. Some, among them legal scholars, believe that, if there are not circumstances that establish intent, a first-degree murder conviction for a dealer whose customer died from an overdose could not survive a constitutional challenge.

The drug abuse treatment and drug law reform communities nearly universally agree that stiff penalties do not deter drug crime and may contribute to the crisis by discouraging people from reporting overdoses and seeking treatment.

“A tough-on-crime approach has a high likelihood of backfiring: overzealous law enforcement can lead fewer people to come forward when their companions are overdosing, thereby increasing health risks,” said a 2018 study about the opioid crisis in Public Health Reports. According to this theory, if Wadley, who does not have a history of violent crime, is sent to prison as a murderer, it will have no effect on the drug trade or the overdose rate.

Mandatory minimums

While other facets of the justice system, including drug laws, are in the midst of reform, the opioid epidemic is one area in which Florida lawmakers, police and prosecutors remain firmly committed to extreme punishments for the dealers and traffickers they believe responsible. When then-Gov. Rick Scott signed new mandatory minimums for fentanyl possession into law (three to four years for 14 grams, 15 years for 14 to 28 grams, 24 years for more than 28 grams), Talking Drugs, a drug law news publication, referred to it as “draconian.”

Critics believe the law will ensnare addicts who sell small quantities to support their habit, shipping them off to prison, which is largely seen as an ineffective setting to address the underlying causes of addiction. Further, because the law does not differentiate between pure fentanyl and drugs containing fentanyl, vastly different punishments could be meted out for possession of the same quantity of the drug.

The legislation also added fentanyl to the list of drugs that dealers can be charged with murder for for selling a deadly dose.

The public is against giving drug dealers the death penalty, according to Robert Dunham, executive director of Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks data and news associated with capital punishment.

“Notably, public opinion polls show Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of this idea,” Dunham said. A2018 national survey by Rasmussen Reports found that only 33% approved of the death penalty for drug traffickers.

Nevertheless, many in law enforcement view the death penalty as a necessary tool to fight a deadly drug epidemic. And they have a powerfulally in the Oval Office. The president has on numerous occasions suggested the death penalty for drug dealers.

“I am not aware of any actual death cases for drug dealers for drug-related offenses,” Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office said via email.

Though prosecutors are not seeking death for Wadley, the State Attorney’s responses to questions indicate that it was considered. Asked for the breakdown of votes by the death penalty review panel, the State Attorney’s Office did not respond, citing “grand jury secrecy laws, attorney work product, and our own investigative exemption.” On the same grounds, it also refused to provide the memo that prosecutors in potential death penalty cases in the circuit are required to provide to the panel.

Considering charging Wadley with a capital offense would not be particularly remarkable, as prosecutors typically consider all the potential punishments available to them. Pursuing the death penalty in such a case before a grand jury, on the other hand, is highly unusual.

Once the nation’s pill mill capital

The cause of the sudden increase of illicit opioid trade is no mystery in Florida. For years, pill mills — places where people essentially could buy pharmaceutical drugs — flourished without much hindrance from state government. Addicts, traffickers and dealers from all over the country flocked to the state to buy drugs. The state became known as the pill mill capital of America. At one time85% of all sales of the opioid oxycodone occurred in Florida. In 2010, oxycodone caused roughly 1,500 deaths in Florida.

Seeking to reverse course, in 2010 Florida banned doctors from distributing narcotics in their offices.

Upon signing the law, Scott said, “This legislation will save lives in our state and it marks the beginning of the end of Florida’s infamous role as the nation’s pill mill capital.”

For a time, he was right. Sales of oxycodone in its many forms plummeted, falling 97% in the first six months of 2011, the New York Times reported.

With opioids no longer legally available, andstreet prices rising rapidly, addicts turned to a cheaper, readily available alternative: heroin. Heroin use soared, ushering in a new drug epidemic. As the crisis worsened, some questioned the wisdom of closing the pill mills, particularly without appropriating resources for treating the addicts who practically overnight found themselves short on supply.

Fentanyl worse than heroin

When synthetic, cheaper fentanyl roared onto the drug scene, the stage was set for a crisis that would make those caused by pill mills, then heroin, pale in comparison.

Opioids have flooded the streets of Jacksonville over the last several years, and the city has been hit particularly hard by the overdose epidemic.

While heroin itself is undeniably dangerous, fentanyl and its analogues are far more so. Fentanyl can be approximately50 to 100 times more potent than morphine; analogues like carfentanil are even stronger.

Because fentanyl is cheap and creating the same high takes so little in comparison, often heroin and other drugs are cut with it. According to the DEA, “Many users believe that they are purchasing heroin and actually don’t know that they are purchasing fentanyl — which often results in overdose deaths.” In some instances, dealers aren’t even aware that the drugs they sell contain fentanyl. And because potency varies widely, it can be very difficult for even seasoned drug addicts who know they’re taking fentanyl to safely gauge dosage.

First responders often administer naloxone, a rapid opioid reversal agent, multiple times a shift, sometimes to the same patient. The drug’s hold is so strong that emergency responders, who didn’t want their names used, said people on the verge of overdose have been known to refuse naloxone, not wanting to come down from their high.

Debate on harsher penalties

As the region grapples with the epidemic, Jacksonville’s top prosecutor has proven herself willing to prosecute dealers for drug-induced homicide. In May 2017, the office of Melissa Nelson, state attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, filed such a charge for the first time against Trumaine Muller. She and the sheriff’s office used the case as an example of their tough-on-drugs approach to the opioid epidemic.

The murder charge was later dropped and case referred to federal court; Muller was subsequentlyconvicted on federal charges of selling a lethal dose of fentanyl and sentenced to life in prison.

It didn’t take long for Nelson’s office to try to pin a first-degree murder rap on another alleged drug dealer: Deonte Wadley.

If convicted, Wadley would be the first to be convicted of this charge in the Fourth Circuit.

Some wonder if, in their haste to punish, law enforcement is bypassing historic intent requirements, as well as the principle that the harshest penalties are reserved for the “worst of the worst.” Others point to evidence that strict penalties do little to deter crime and cause unnecessary suffering to defendants’ loved ones and society at large.

Pointing to relatively low rates of cases solved for offenses like murder (59.4% nationally in 2016); higher rates of violent crime,including homicide, in jurisdictions with the death penalty; and theracial disparities in the criminal justice system, Cox said that instead of being tough on crime, the nation has been “tough on criminals.”

“For locking up all the people the U.S. does, we’re not getting any closer to solving these issues … violent crime, addiction levels,” she said.

As states fight the opioid epidemic with harsh laws that harken back to the war on drugs, there is a growing chorus of opposition.

A2017 report by reform advocates at the Drug Policy Alliance made the case that these laws are counterproductive and inhumane, citing their ineffectiveness at deterring drug use or trade, the potential for misuse of prosecutorial discretion, perpetuation of racial disparities and the possibility of undermining 911 Good Samaritan laws and contributing to preventable deaths.

Complications from homicide charges

Though prosecutors in some jurisdictions have specifically asserted that they will not file murder charges against people who summon help or provide aid to an overdose victim, there is nothing in the drug-induced homicide statute preventing it. Further, Florida’s911 Good Samaritan law, which provides prosecutorial immunity to people who seek assistance for themselves or another overdose victim, only covers charges of possession, not murder.

These charges also present potential problems proving all the elements of murder. Echoing others, Wadley’s attorney, Thomas Richard Garland II, said that prosecutors will have a problem establishing intent. He categorized the fentanyl-induced homicide law as “vague and overbroad,” suggesting that it is ripe for a challenge.

“Any law that makes the death penalty available in circumstances in which there is no intent to kill will face serious constitutional challenges, and these types of laws face other additional challenges, namely … how does the government prove what a defendant’s intent was,” said Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The State Attorney’s Office disagrees, likening drug-induced homicide tofelony murder laws that allow co-conspirators to be prosecuted for murder if someone dies during the commission of a dangerous felony, regardless of intent.

“The premise of ‘intent to kill’ is misleading as these cases are just a subset of felony murder. Intent to kill is not required under Florida statute — just intent to distribute the controlled substance that proximately causes death,” the State Attorney said via email.

Though many believe otherwise, under felony-murder and drug-induced homicide laws, intent to cause death is essentially irrelevant. Nevertheless, prosecutors will have to convince a jury that Wadley’s selling a deadly batch of drugs warrants convicting him of premediated murder. This would put selling a deadly batch of drugs on par with murder by violent means.

There are other facts that the prosecution will have to overcome to justify sending 23-year-old Wadley to prison for the rest of his life.

Nothing in the publicly available police file indicates that Wadley was present at the time of Sexton’s death or when he ingested the drugs. Nor has law enforcement charged him in any additional overdoses or claimed that Wadley himself mixed the batch, either of which could establish his knowledge of the deadly nature of the substance he is accused of selling.

Detectives claim they purchased $180 and $200 worth of heroin and fentanyl, respectively, from Wadley to establish that he sold the drugs that killed Sexton. The arrest and booking report states that the buy was for the relatively small amount of 1 gram of heroin, a quantity typically sold by a street dealer. (The quantity of fentanyl purchased is redacted.) Wadley’s criminal record includes roughly a dozen charges and convictions for possession and intent to distribute drugs, not uncommon for street dealers.

Drug-induced homicide laws were sold to the public as a means of punishing high-level drug traffickers and dealers, not addicts and small-time dealers. According to law enforcement, prosecutors and criminal attorneys, generally speaking, high-level drug traffickers do not directly sell relatively small amounts to customers, nor do they sell directly to users.

Yet today Wadley stands accused of murder. The police file indicates a dealer-customer relationship, but he could just as easily have been charged if he and Sexton were friends who shared drugs, so long as he provided them. Because the law itself is silent on this, nothing prevents prosecutors from filing murder charges against someone who shares drugs. In fact, charges have been filed under these circumstances on multiple occasions in other states, including against the victim’s family members and intimate partners.

No blame for the victim

Some believe that charging someone who sold or shared drugs with murder further circumvents the notion that adults are responsible for their actions, even if those actions lead to their death.

“To what extent does the victim’s conduct come into play in attempting to determine the defendant’s criminal liability?” Dunham said.

The dangers of heroin and fentanyl are well-documented. Yet the state does not apportion blame to the victim of a deadly overdose, even if that victim was aware of the risk.

“Victim culpability is a concept more applicable to civil law when comparative fault is at play,” the State Attorney’s office said via email. “Victim culpability has no legal role in criminal cases unless you are dealing with a legal defense like self-defense,” adding that the same is true of “almost all crimes, including sexual assaults, non-drug murders, assaults, batteries, etc.”

Yet unlike these crimes, victims of drug-induced homicides may have willingly bought and ingested the substance that led to their deaths with full awareness that it could kill them.

Meanwhile, the overdose rate has finally begun to fall in Jacksonville.

Two years ago, the city launched a pilot program to facilitate treatment for overdose victims. Through Project Save Lives, overdose victims are stabilized in the hospital, then transferred to treatment facilities.

In the year and a half since the program began, overdoses have fallen. After steadily increasing over a period of years to the 2017 high of 546 deaths in which fentanyl or its analogs were present, Action News Jax reported in January a preliminary total of 311 such deaths in 2018. That year overdoses decreased 20% and there were 27% fewer doses of naloxone administered.

This project was collaboratively produced with Jaxlookout and underwritten in part by The Vital Projects Fund.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/07/29/florida-considers-murder-charge-for-drug-dealers/feed/0Tampa State Attorney’s Proposed ‘Rocket Docket’ Would Help Ex-offenders Get Voting Rights Backhttps://jjie.org/2019/07/15/tampa-state-attorneys-proposed-rocket-docket-would-help-ex-offenders-get-voting-rights-back/
Mon, 15 Jul 2019 13:36:11 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=939330Last November, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that automatically restores the right to vote to people convicted of felonies (except murderers and sex offenders) who have completed all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation.

]]>Last November, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that automatically restores the right to vote to people convicted of felonies (except murderers and sex offenders) who have completed all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation.

But when the state legislature met this spring, it passed a bill, Senate Bill 7066, specifying that the ex-offenders pay back court costs and restitution first.

Tampa State Attorney Andrew Warren

Critics have called this requirement a “poll tax.” The ACLU is suing and hopes to overturn the law. Other groups are more focused on complying with it, by raising funds for ex-offenders to meet their obligations and providing legal advice. In Tampa, state attorney Andrew Warren is doing what he can to expedite the process: He has proposed a “rocket docket” to convert outstanding fines to community service.

Florida has a long history of denying former offenders the right to vote. It first did so three years after the Civil War ended, in 1868. in 2007, then-Gov. Charlie Crist revised the rules of executive clemency, restoring the vote to people who had completed sentences for certain felony convictions, affecting about 115,000 people.

When Rick Scott took over as governor, he reversed Crist’s reforms and added new hurdles: Under him, people with felony convictions had to wait five to seven years after completing their sentences, then come before Scott and his cabinet to ask for restoration of rights, which could still be denied. A federal judge ruled that system violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, but that decision is being appealed; oral arguments are scheduled for July 25. In the meantime, groups organized to pass Amendment 4.

“I was one of the earliest supporters of Amendment Four,” said Warren, state attorney for Florida’s 13th judicial district, who is running for re-election in 2020. “I think I was one of only two state attorneys to come out in support of it. From the time before it was even voted on and passed overwhelmingly by Floridians, we were thinking about ways that we could implement it.”

The roadblock from the legislature did not come as a surprise: “We anticipated from the moment it was passed that there may be legislation on it,” Warren said. The new laws did not establish processes for identifying ex-offenders affected by them, nor for settling their fines and clearing them to vote. “So we are filling in that gap,” he said.

Warren’s office is working with his local public defender’s office, chief judge and clerk’s office, as well as the supervisor of elections, to set up a process that would be as glitch-free as possible. He says that so far, key officials are open to the process and he has not received any pushback. He hopes to develop a model that could be copied by other judicial districts so that the process is uniform around the state.

“We will find the resources to do this,” Warren said when asked if he had the budget and staff to work on it. “This is an important part of the mission of our office, to make sure that not only we’re holding people accountable for their crimes and reducing recidivism and supporting victims, but also helping people transition back into the community to be law-abiding citizens.”

The ACLU’s lawsuit claims that the legislature’s restrictions are unconstitutional, violating the prohibition on poll taxes and the ex post facto clauses. “The ability to vote should not be based on the size of one’s bank account,” Daniel Tilley, legal director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement.

Legal experts have debated whether that argument will hold. Some point out that one of the attorneys supporting Amendment 4 had assured a state supreme court justice in testimony that it would require “the full payment of any fines.”

The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which led the effort to pass Amendment 4, started a crowdfunded account to pay the fees. It has raised $112,056 of a stated $3 million goal by Monday. Former state Rep. Sean Shaw said he did not think SB 7066 amounted to a poll tax, but questioned whether it comported with voters’ spirit in approving Amendment 4. He set up People Over Profits, a legal network that will advise former offenders through the vote-restoration process.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for his part, questioned why Amendment 4 dealt only with restoring the right to vote but not all civil rights such as the right to sit on a jury or hold elected office. He lamented that it had restored voting to violent felons such as kidnappers, without regard to victims. He signed SB 7066 into law in June.

]]>Florida Progressive Candidates Could Mean Big Changes in Broward Countyhttps://jjie.org/2019/06/25/florida-progressive-candidates-could-mean-big-changes-in-broward-county/
Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:00:13 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=925680On June 4, after 44 years in office, Broward County’s state attorney, Michael Satz, announced he’ll be stepping down. His departure could herald a sea change for the county’s criminal justice system, which has been marred by high-profile crimes and allegations of racially biased policing.

]]>MIAMI — On June 4, after 44 years in office, Broward County’s state attorney, Michael Satz, announced he’ll be stepping down. His departure could herald a sea change for the county’s criminal justice system, which has been marred by high-profile crimes and allegations of racially biased policing.

Even though Broward leans heavily Democratic, and even though both the left and right in recent years have been inching toward criminal justice reform, South Florida voters have consistently embraced Satz, a quiet, conservative Democrat who embodies a tough-on-crime ethos. His website boasts that he once “achieved the highest total conviction rate for trials and guilty pleas in the state, a high standard his office works hard to maintain.”

Now, though, three people in the running for Satz’s job say they want to keep people out of jail, not put them in. Two have officially declared their candidacies and a third, who narrowly lost to Satz in 2016, says she might be running. All describe themselves as progressives.

If Broward does veer left, it would add to a wave of progressive prosecutors swept into office since 2016, a trend fueled by millions of dollars funneled through political action committees from left-leaning billionaire George Soros. As a group, these progressive leaders are death penalty skeptics, want to reduce arrests for nonviolent crimes and put the brakes on a system that they say profits from incarceration.

Now Soros-backed PACs are ramping up for 2020. The Justice and Public Safety PAC already has pumped nearly $1 million into prosecutor races in two Virginia counties.

That group focused its earlier efforts on candidates who were challenging the most draconian state attorneys,or who were likely to lose without Soros’ help. PAC treasurer Whitney Tymas did not respond to a question about whether the group would fund a candidate in Broward.

Broward ‘perfect reflection’

Satz’s office is only one of four major Broward judicial positions up for grabs in 2020. Embattled county Sheriff Scott Israel, suspended for his handling of the Parkland school shooting last year, is fighting to regain his job. So far six people havefiled to replace him. Public defender Howard Finklestein, first elected in 2004, is leaving office. Even the clerk of courts race is contentious, with incumbent Brenda Forman — who is undercriminal investigation — being challenged by her ex-husband, Howard Forman.

Broward is home to 1.9 million people and 24 miles of coastline, but it’s known for its crime, both fictional and real. The county was the location for the first season of the TV show “Cops”and has been the setting for famous judicial proceedings, including a review of circumstances surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Then there are the pot-smoking judges and disgracedex-sheriffs who faced time in jail.

The mass shooting at Broward’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year jolted the nation, but as with any municipality, the majority of arrestees moving through the county’s courthouse and jails are low-income, nonviolent offenders.

“Broward is the perfect reflection of problems with the broader criminal justice system,” said Democrat Joseph Kimok, a teacher-turned-lawyer who spent three years as an assistant state attorney and has filed to run for Satz’s seat. “We overcharge, we over-incarcerate, we rely too much on cash bail.”

Joe Kimok

Kimok, who earned his law degree in 2010, is best known for defending Zachary Cruz, the teenage brother of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz. After the shooting, Zachary Cruz was arrested when he was discovered on the Parkland school campus.

The case, Kimok said, reflects the “overall philosophy” of Satz’s office: “Prosecutors asked for three-quarters of a million dollars bail on a kid arrested for trespassing.”

Zachary was kept in custody, which Kimok said pressured him to take a plea deal in the case. If elected, Kimok said, he would instruct his staff not to seek cash bail in cases where the accused presents no danger to the community.

“Most folks that don’t show up to court, they are not running,” Kimok said. “They slept through their alarm clock that day or they’re a junkie and too high and forgot about court.”

Kimok is married to a black civil litigation attorney, Jordanne Kimok, and their son is biracial, which Kimok said makes him particularly attuned to racial disparities and excessive force in policing.

He wouldn’t seek mandatory minimums on drug cases or file possession charges for marijuana. He would incorporate data in his decision-making and be transparent, especially in death penalty cases, he said.

“The way our state attorney makes death penalty decisions is a mystery to all of us,” Kimok said. “That decision has to be extraordinarily transparent.”

Let’s ‘fix broken people’

Jim Lewis, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who spent 12 years as a prosecutor, including at the Office of Statewide Prosecution, is also running. Like Kimok, he considers himself a progressive, even though he ran as a Republican in 2012, facing off against Satz in the general election.

Like Kimok, Lewis would stop jailing people for marijuana offenses, which he calls “a total waste of time.”

Jim Lewis

He rejects the prevailing wisdom that criminals need to be incarcerated to protect the community. Experience has shown that drug abuse and mental illness are what drive people to commit crimes, he said.

“Unless they kill somebody, they’re going to get out. So let’s use the system to fix broken people,” Lewis said. The current system is set up “so that lobbyists and the Corrections Corporation of America can make more money.”

Another progressive Democrat, Teresa Williams, has formed an exploratory committee. A former Miami-Dade prosecutor, also a veteran of the Prosecution Office and now a private criminal defense attorney, Williams challenged Satz in 2016, losing by 5,400 votes.

Her campaign that year won backing from an organization that’s won funding from Soros, Color of Change.

“It’s all about money,” she said. “The more cases you file, the more defense attorneys make, more the bondsmen make, the more judges you need to bring in.”

“It winds up being a cycle with everyone with their heads in their wallets instead of looking at what should happen in the system. Meanwhile you’re destroying a whole group of people,” primarily poor blacks, Williams said.

Teresa Williams

Whether Williams she runs again will depend on who else enters the race.

“This race will be decided in the Democratic primary,” she said. “We know exactly who is voting. It’s not your average individual. These are supervoters … What you see is large voting blocs in the black community coming out of the churches. It’s not the general populace.”

Whatever happens, Kimok said, “it’s an exciting time. We’ve got an opportunity here in Broward County to really do things very, very differently than they’ve been done for a long, long time.”

]]>Florida Mother Asks Why We Pull Out the Adult Card For Crimeshttps://jjie.org/2019/06/24/florida-mother-asks-why-we-pull-out-the-adult-card-for-crimes/
https://jjie.org/2019/06/24/florida-mother-asks-why-we-pull-out-the-adult-card-for-crimes/#commentsMon, 24 Jun 2019 13:00:58 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=925755My daughter Taylor has been raised in adult jails and prisons since she was 15. She is now 19 and it will be another six years before she can come home. At that point, as she navigates being an adult in a world she’s never known, she’ll carry the burden of probation until she’s 35.

“Mom, do you know what it feels like to hardly remember your life at home?”

“Mom, I haven’t seen or felt sunlight for weeks.”

My daughter Taylor has been raised in adult jails and prisons since she was 15. She is now 19 and it will be another six years before she can come home. At that point, as she navigates being an adult in a world she’s never known, she’ll carry the burden of probation until she’s 35.

Kim Lawrance

She has been labeled a felon for life. Like other kids in adult jails and prisons, she has spent months in isolation to protect her from the very adults she is deemed by law to be on par with. She shows signs of PTSD, and I can only advocate for her from the sidelines.

How did she get there? Yes, she broke the law and she did need to be held accountable. However, the prosecutor decided that she should be tried as an adult. There was no input from a judge, no evaluations and no interviews with teachers or jail staff. Instead, my 15-year-old was woken up in the middle of the night, re-booked, given a different color uniform and told she was now an adult. Rather than a system intended to rehabilitate at-risk kids, she was sent to a system designed to punish adults. And there was nothing anyone could do to change what the prosecutor set into motion. No possibility to even try to appeal.

What if this was your son or daughter? I didn’t think this could happen to me, but it can absolutely happen to anyone. There are kids in prisons who come from families of all walks of life. Especially in Florida, where nearly 1,000 juveniles are prosecuted as adults each year — more than California, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan combined. Nearly all of these kids are sent directly to the adult system by prosecutors, with no evaluation or judicial review.

Taylor was a straight-A student and a competitive cheerleader. She had just finished the ninth grade. She had never been arrested before. Now she’s a statistic. She and four other kids made the mistake of a lifetime. I say mistake because at 15, that’s what it was.

It is a fact, not an opinion, that a teenager’s brain is not fully developed to weigh risks and consequences. It’s why they do stupid stuff. That’s why we don’t allow children to vote, serve on juries, enter a legal contract or join the military. So why do we pull out the adult card for crimes? Teens will age out of crime. Let’s offer help through services, not ruin their future with punishment.

Single prosecutor shouldn’t decide

Prison is not a solution, especially for kids. In adult prisons, there are no resources to meet the growing psychological needs of children or to protect them from the trauma of solitary confinement. They are at a higher risk for sexual abuse and they are 36 times as likely to die of suicide than their peers in juvenile facilities.

What many forget is that these kids do eventually come back to society. After being locked up with adults, they are 30% more likely to reoffend. Growing up in prison exposes them to worse alternatives.

What do you think they are learning in prisons? Sending a child to prison replaces the most important social bond, the family, with an institution, destroying their emotional well-being. Adult charges label them for life, making future opportunities such as jobs and housing difficult. What do we expect the outcome to be? Don’t we want them to be better people?

We must take adult prosecution of our youth more seriously. This session, Florida legislators failed to include comprehensive criminal justice reform for our kids, particularly the ability to have a judge review decisions to prosecute them as adults. We cannot continue leaving these life-changing decisions to a single prosecutor with no avenue to appeal, and legislators must understand that Floridians deserve better justice.

My daughter — and every child — deserves to be more than just a statistic.

Kim Lawrence is a Florida juvenile justice reform advocate and mother of a directly impacted teenager.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/06/24/florida-mother-asks-why-we-pull-out-the-adult-card-for-crimes/feed/7Florida Death Penalty, Trying Children As Adults Means Not Believing People Can Redeem Themselveshttps://jjie.org/2019/06/07/florida-death-penalty-trying-children-as-adults-means-not-believing-people-can-redeem-themselves/
https://jjie.org/2019/06/07/florida-death-penalty-trying-children-as-adults-means-not-believing-people-can-redeem-themselves/#commentsFri, 07 Jun 2019 13:00:14 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=916795One of the basic questions we must ask ourselves when considering criminal justice reform is: Do we really believe that people are redeemable? Our response drives our personal philosophies on how justice systems should look. As long as there is debate about humans’ ability to reform, we will not have agreement as a society about what constitutes justice.

]]>One of the basic questions we must ask ourselves when considering criminal justice reform is: Do we really believe that people are redeemable? Our response drives our personal philosophies on how justice systems should look. As long as there is debate about humans’ ability to reform, we will not have agreement as a society about what constitutes justice.

Ingrid Delgado

Representing the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, the public policy voice of the Catholic Church in Florida, we enter this debate with the premise that everyone is redeemable. After all, our sacred scriptures are full of really bad people who went on to do really great things after a transformative experience.

Believing that everyone can change their lives, however, is not the same as believing that everyone will change their lives. We know that the right combination of interventions and community support is a key element in these transformations.

For too long, Florida has prided itself in being tough on crime, mostly as a result of a spike in crime about 30 years ago, leading to both harsher sentences of juveniles and a peak in support for capital punishment in the 1990s. Two examples of extreme policies are clear: trying children as adults and the use of capital punishment.

Children in adult court

The old theory of the juvenile “superpredator” justified harsher sentences of young people many years ago. This theory has now been discredited and much of the country has since abandoned juvenile life without parole sentences. However, children continue to be tried as adults. Florida, particularly, transfers more children to the adult criminal justice system than any other state. We ought not to accept the thinking that Florida’s children are somehow worse than their counterparts around the country, making such practices a necessity.

Our state has three mechanisms by which children can be tried as adults. The processes of direct file and judicial waiver can only be applied to children 14 years old and older. While we believe that no child should be transferred to the adult system because they can be held accountable for crimes in the juvenile justice system, we recognize that these laws at the very least prevent very young children from being transferred. However, the third transfer process, indictment, has no age minimum. And while it does not occur often, children ages 13 and younger can be tried as adults in Florida.

This policy must be changed to at least require the same age minimum of 14 as the other mechanisms. If we cannot agree that 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-old children have the ability to reform and transform their lives, then we as a society have lost hope in anyone being rehabilitated.

Death penalty

Similar to juvenile transfer policies, Florida is also a national outlier in its use of capital punishment. According to The Death Penalty Information Center, 20 states and Washington, D.C. have either abolished or overturned the death penalty and four others have declared gubernatorial moratoria. Of the states that do maintain the death penalty, most have not carried out an execution in many years. Only eight states carried out at least one execution in 2018. Florida was one of the five that carried out more than one.

While Florida is the country’s third most populous state, it houses the second most populous death row in the nation. It’s second to California, whose governor recently declared a moratorium of the death penalty and granted reprieve to everyone sentenced to death in that state. Duval County in Florida has historically had the highest per capita rate for inmates on death row of any U.S. county. (Note: We look forward to future reporting showing progress as Duval County has elected a new prosecutor and the Florida legislature has passed a law requiring juries be unanimous to sentence someone to death.)

In 2018, Florida tied with Texas in the country’s highest number of persons sentenced to death. And Florida leads the nation in the highest number of death row exonerees with a grand total of 29 people released from death row.

There has not been a Florida study regarding the fiscal impact of capital punishment since 2000. However, cost studies around the nation consistently conclude that the death penalty costs taxpayers significantly more than the alternative sentence of life without parole. For example, a 2016 study in Nebraska found that taxpayers paid $1.5 million more per capital case in comparison to a first-degree murder case that pursued life without parole.

Public opinion polling shows that a growing majority of people in the state and in the country prefer alternatives to the death penalty. The severe sentence of life without parole, for instance, can keep society safe without taking an additional life. There is no significant research that shows that the death penalty is necessary to keep society safe or deters future crime.

And while some murder victims’ family members hope the death penalty will provide closure for their great loss, we know many murder victims’ family members whose grief has been exacerbated by the decades of judicial uncertainty and whose key to closure was mercy and forgiveness, rather than state-sanctioned homicide. It seems as if only retribution and vengeance have kept capital punishment alive.

Florida has ended up with a punitive system of laws with a huge economic impact on our taxpayers without making our communities any safer. Let us begin a transformation of our communities with an introspective transformation of our hearts and minds.

Florida could:

reinvest public dollars toward real mental health treatment of those in the justice system or youth at high risk of becoming part of the system;

treat addiction as the disease that it is rather than the crime it has become;

invest in strengthening families and job training since familial ties and self-sufficiency are cornerstones of keeping people out of incarceration;

expand restorative justice opportunities that seek healing and integration of both victims and offenders.

Our radical proposal to reform criminal justice is to begin with abandoning the philosophy and confronting the bias that some people are irredeemable. From there, our society can work to restructure the corresponding policies that have arisen from those attitudes. A couple of easy first steps would be to treat children as children and end the government’s premeditated homicide of captive prisoners.

Ingrid Delgado represents the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops on issues of human life, dignity and social justice before the legislative and executive branches of government and private organizations. She initiates legislative networking with various groups, monitors and participates in the state appropriations process, and coordinates legislative and advocacy projects throughout the state.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/06/07/florida-death-penalty-trying-children-as-adults-means-not-believing-people-can-redeem-themselves/feed/6Jacksonville, Tampa Prosecutors Pursue Aggressive Reform Agendas With Public Supporthttps://jjie.org/2019/05/30/jacksonville-tampa-prosecutors-pursue-aggressive-reform-agendas-with-public-support-few-setbacks-so-far/
https://jjie.org/2019/05/30/jacksonville-tampa-prosecutors-pursue-aggressive-reform-agendas-with-public-support-few-setbacks-so-far/#commentsThu, 30 May 2019 13:00:46 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=913065Two grey-haired men listened silently in Courtroom 505 of the Duval County Courthouse on March 28 as Judge Angela M. Cox uttered the words that they’d waited the better part of 50 years to hear: “The indictments against you have been dismissed and you are free to go.”

]]>JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Two grey-haired men listened silently in Courtroom 505 of the Duval County Courthouse on March 28 as Judge Angela M. Cox uttered the words that they’d waited the better part of 50 years to hear: “The indictments against you have been dismissed and you are free to go.”

After spending more than 42 years in prison for murder and attempted murder, with that pronouncement Nathan Myers and Clifford Williams took their place in Florida history as the first people to be exonerated by a prosecutor-led effort.

The nation has begun to recognize the injustices spawned by the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s that created thehighest incarceration rate and prison population in the world. Whereas once punishment was king, the new goal is reform.

In Florida, the increased rejection of the purely punitive model of criminal justice has led to the election of so-called reform prosecutors. In 2016, Jacksonville and Tampa elected Melissa Nelson and Andrew Warren, respectively, to the top prosecutor job. Both, though particularly Nelson, whose office worked to secure Myers’ and Williams’ exonerations, ran against prosecutors criticized for their harshness. Both campaigned on reform.

(Disclosure: Following the death of this reporter’s friend in another Florida jurisdiction in April, Nelson spoke with law enforcement assigned to the case against the accused killer and offered her office as a liaison.)

In the years since, Nelson and Warren have made good on their promises to overhaul and improve the brand of justice meted out by their offices, as the public had increasingly called for and definitively approved by voting for them. Both also have ambitious plans to continue evolving. By and large their reforms have been well received, with relatively quiet pushback thus far.

And while there’s no clear evidence to suggest other prosecutors around the state are following in their footsteps, there is no doubt they are watching and waiting to see what fate befalls the new type of prosecutor who is driven by justice, rather than punishment. Reform-minded challengers seeking office in other circuits seem far more likely than a chief prosecutor altering course midstream.

Claire Goforth

Jacksonville State Attorney Melissa Nelson (center) at the exoneration of Clifford Williams and Nathan Meyers on March 28.

Focus on juveniles

Shortly after taking office, Nelson’s and Warren’s first major change was in juvenile justice. While campaigning, both promised to keep far more kids out of the criminal justice system than their predecessors had by increasing the use of civil citations. Today, police in their circuits, the Fourth and Thirteenth respectively, now have far greater discretion to issue civil citations in lieu of criminal summons to eligible juveniles.

“We initiated a partnership with law enforcement from all three counties [Duval, Clay and Nassau] to increase the use of juvenile civil citations. In the two years the agreement has been in place, the results have been remarkable — in 2018, 83% of juveniles eligible for a citation were given one instead of being arrested. As recently as 2015, that figure was 28%,” Nelson’s office wrote in response to an emailed inquiry.

Other changes that the pair, who have consulted with one another professionally, have made include issuing more civil summons, utilizing diversion programs more often for low-level offenders and ramping up use of specialized courts for veterans and those with mental health issues. These changes make it easier for people to get their driver’s license back or avoid having it suspended altogether. They’ve also made it a priority to not punish those in poverty, and have launched divisions within their offices to review potential wrongful convictions like those of co-defendants Myers and Williams.

After agreeing to examine the case of Myers and Williams, the conviction integrity unit in Nelson’s office, in what took nearly a year, was able to unequivocally demonstrate that the evidence did not support conviction. By reviewing the evidence and re-interviewing witnesses, the integrity unit proved that their alibi was backed up by dozens of people and the physical evidence did not support conviction. Myers’ and Williams’ defense attorney, now deceased, did not present any of this evidence at trial, instead solely arguing to discredit the account of the eyewitness and attempted murder victim, also now deceased.

It’s rare that a prosecutor’s office was responsible for correcting a past wrongful conviction. “But for her [Nelson’s] presence in that office, those two individuals would still be in prison,” said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution.

Nelson herself seemed to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation. In the minutes after the judge handed down the decision clearing the men of all charges, she told a reporter, “It’s kind of overwhelming.”

Office of the State Attorney 13th Judicial Circuit

Tampa State Attorney Andrew Warren

Collaborative approaches to reform

Like all societal shifts, criminal justice reform isn’t something that happens overnight or without difficulty. Along the way, Nelson and Warren have encountered setbacks and, though neither was willing to admit it, pushback from other prosecutors — both within and outside their offices — as well as from the public and police.

Asked if there have been naysayers, Warren responded through a spokesperson via email, “Our office has overwhelmingly embraced change because when they are in the trenches every day fighting to hold offenders accountable and seek justice for victims, they see first-hand the flaws in an outdated approach to criminal justice.” Nelson also said that if there are any who disagree with her agenda, they haven’t told her.

Attorneys and stakeholders interviewed agree that it helps minimize criticisms that both have taken measured, if ambitious, approaches to reform, engaging with members of their offices, the community and stakeholders-at-large on each initiative.

“Her office worked with us and they actually amended the felony PTI [pretrial intervention] contract …” said Linda Joseph, chief operating officer ofOperation New Hope, a Jacksonville-based nonprofit that provides job and life-skill training to people with criminal records to help them transition to productive lives. Local prosecutors “now have discretion to require felony defendants to come to our program.”

The result has been collaborative and far more positively received than it might have been if they had implemented change from the top down.

Nelson credited the people who work for her with suggesting some of the measures she’s initiated. “Some of our very best ideas, from something small like workflow mapping to something big like Keys 2 Drive, have come from inside the office,” she said in a phone interview. Keys 2 Drive makes it easier for people to get their licenses back and avoid suspension. Workflow mapping helps make the prosecutorial process more transparent and trackable for those within the office.

Some disconnects

Nevertheless, areport found a slight disconnect between some employees within each office and the leaders. Researchers from Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago, which received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, anonymously interviewed prosecutors in Nelson’s and Warren’s offices with their full cooperation. Some prosecutors reported a feeling that the leader’s vision was not always making it to the rank-and-file, particularly if middle managers disagreed with the leader’s vision.

“If you want a change, you have to make sure those below you have the same mindset …” a prosecutor in Nelson’s office told researchers. “If you have a division chief that is not in line with the mission, then you will lose.”

A prosecutor in Warren’s office shared similar concerns. “If Mr. Warren is set on setting other priorities, I think he needs to clearly convey those things to the chiefs. I don’t think the chiefs are always communicating what Mr. Warren wants. I think sometimes they do things based on their own beliefs.”

The report found other similarities between the two offices, including responses to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. While some blamed the conduct of those who get caught up in the system, others took a more societal view of the issue. “This is America and there are disparities anywhere you look,” said one from Nelson’s office.

Many of the changes necessary to usher in a new era are largely, sometimes entirely, outside prosecutors’ control. The series of events that lead to an arrest necessarily involve both the police and the law itself. Once a defendant is arrested, there is only so much a prosecutor can do.

“I think there are some areas where there have yet to be a complete awakening around the growing mood in our communities and whether there continue to be some remnants of a tough on crime approaches,” said Krinsky, adding that that attitude remains more prevalent at the federal level.

Earlier this spring, theFlorida legislature mulled several ambitious criminal justice reforms, including one that would retroactively make nonviolent offenders who had served 65% of their sentences eligible for release. The current standard requires 85% of time served before such eligibility. Two other proposed reforms would have given judges more discretion over sentencing for certain drug crimes and allowed for resentencing people convicted of aggravated assault under previous, harsher laws.

None of these made it intothe bill that passed in early May. This failure makes it unlikely that Florida, with a current incarceration rate of 720 per capita (the national average is 660) will see much, if any, reduction in this rate.

Public reaction to the reforms has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. Detractors have not spoken out. But if the crime rate increases in Nelson’s or Warren’s jurisdictions, or if a discretionary decision is made to reduce or not file charges against someone who later commits a high-profile or particularly heinous crime, the public’s response may change.

“There is a growing recognition … that how we’ve done things in the past simply hasn’t worked and there’s need for new thinking and new paradigms when it comes to keeping our communities safer and healthier,” Krinsky said.

“Certainly we can incapacitate people …” Nelson said. “We’ve really been trying to think of approaches to make the community safer and better off.”

It is also true that, while the Florida legislature and other politicians have publicly supported the changes implemented by Nelson and Warren, a turning tide of public opinion or political expediency could easily make them into targets just as their predecessors were, though for different reasons.

Next goals

There are additional challenges ahead. Nelson and Warren have already indicated that they will seek reelection to continue the work they’ve begun. There are some areas, such as bail reform, that remain to be addressed.

“Going forward, we are focused on combating human trafficking, improving how we handle domestic violence cases, and addressing problems with bail — as well as making sure the programs we’ve launched over the past 2.5 years continue to excel,” Warren wrote in an email.

“Our Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee is finalizing its report for best practices on a diversion program for juveniles. … We are also exploring the viability of other problem-solving courts and smart justice programs that will benefit the community,” Nelson said through a spokesperson, adding in a follow-up conversation that she has a long list of things she still wants to do.

“We have a strategic plan that we’ve worked on for about a year that’s about to be publicized … that’s a three-year plan that will be publicly available,” she said, noting that her research indicates that this will be the first of its kind in the state.

The road that lies ahead for Melissa Nelson and Andrew Warren and the communities they serve largely depends on the public, and whether people continue to buy in on the idea of overhauling the criminal justice system to make it more equitable, restorative and just. Elections matter, though perhaps particularly those of prosecutors.

“I think both of them have really succeeded in doing a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time,” Krinsky said.

This project was collaboratively produced with Jaxlookout and underwritten in part by The Vital Projects Fund.

]]>https://jjie.org/2019/05/30/jacksonville-tampa-prosecutors-pursue-aggressive-reform-agendas-with-public-support-few-setbacks-so-far/feed/1Florida State Attorney Who Fought Death Penalty Won’t Run Again; No Shortage of Challengershttps://jjie.org/2019/05/28/florida-state-attorney-who-fought-death-penalty-wont-run-again-no-shortage-of-challengers/
Tue, 28 May 2019 19:17:08 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=910503Just two months into her term, in March 2017, the Orlando area state attorney, Aramis Ayala, made an unprecedented announcement. Standing in front of the Orange County Courthouse, a gaggle of TV microphones clipped around her podium, she stated firmly, “I will not be seeking the death penalty in cases in my office.”

]]>ORLANDO, Fla. — State Attorney Aramis Ayala, a polarizing prosecutor who sparked a national debate after declaring that she wouldn’t seek the death penalty in her district, announced today that she won’t run for re-election.

Before her announcement, two challengers had already filed paperwork to run for Ayala’s seat in 2020 — Ryan Williams, a prosecutor who worked under Ayala, and Kevin Morenski, a private attorney. Both said they expect Ayala’s second-in-command, Chief Assistant State Attorney Deborah Barra, to join the race.

Office of the State Attorney

Aramis Ayala, state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties.

Ayala drew national and international attention after she took office in 2017 and declared that she would not seek the death penalty in any cases. The move — which she was forced to reverse after the governor challenged her and the state Supreme Court sided with him — played a role in her decision not to seek re-election.

“After the Florida Supreme Court’s decision on the death penalty, it became abundantly clear to me that death penalty law in the state of Florida is in direct conflict with my view and my vision for the administration of justice,” Ayala said today in a video posted to Facebook.

She said she would serve out her term, unveiling new policies and programs that she expects to last for years, and then “move forward and continue the pursuit of justice in a different capacity.”

In a recent email interview, Ayala had sounded steadfast in her positions.

“Data shows that ‘tough-on-crime’ policies don’t work. They divide communities and drive mass incarceration,” she wrote. “As State Attorney it is important to focus on cultural shifts that expand our thinking about the image of justice and our responsibility as prosecutors.”

Rise to office

Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams

In 2016, Ayala had decided to run for office against her own boss — the state attorney of Florida’s Ninth Judicial Circuit, which covers Orange and Osceola counties, including Orlando.

The political wind was at her back. Then-State Attorney Jeff Ashton, a fellow Democrat, had been caught up in a scandal involving dating website Ashley Madison. And anti-Ashton advertising had begun popping up.

Williams was a fellow Ninth Circuit prosecutor with Ayala when she declared her candidacy and saw her at a function shortly before the ads appeared. At that event, she told him a surprise was coming, he said.

“Lo and behold, there are television ads running during the Olympics, which is unheard of for a state attorney race,” said Williams, a Democrat. A wave of mailers came out too, painting Ashton as racist, Williams said. He was dismayed that Ayala did not refute them.

The ads had been funded by a political action committee backed by left-leaning billionaire George Soros, who had injected $1.4 million into the race. Ayala has maintained that she never spoke with Soros, but she was one of about two dozen candidates in local prosecutor races around the country who were supported by Soros-funded political action committees.

Reporters discovered that Ayala’s husband had served seven years in prison for drug conspiracy and counterfeiting checks. She spun it as a positive — the couple had a deep understanding of the school-to-prison pipeline — and won 57% of the vote in the Democratic primary. She then easily won the general election against a write-in candidate, becoming the first black person to be elected a prosecutor in Florida.

It was a significant victory. Data has shown that 95% of prosecutors are white, which researchers say could bea factor in blacks getting charged with more severe crimes than whites and serving more time in prison.

A high-profile murder

Weeks after Ayala’s election, in December 2017, a man named Markeith Loyd fought with his pregnant girlfriend, then shot her dead on her porch. Police searched for Loyd for a month, asking the public for help.

In January 2018, Orlando police Sgt. Debra Clayton was shopping in a Walmart when another customer approached and told her Loyd was in the store. Clayton confronted him outside and commanded him to stop. Loyd shot her four times, killing her.

It took nine days to capture him. A second law enforcement officer died in a motorcycle crash during the manhunt.

Ayala took office Jan. 6. Loyd was caught 11 days later and indicted by a grand jury Feb. 15.

Williams was handling three of four capital death penalty cases in the prosecutor’s office around that time. As the cases progressed, the state attorney’s office would need to decide whether or not to pursue the death penalty in each of them, because the decision triggers certain procedural rules. Williams said he raised the matter in a staff meeting.

“‘What are we going to say when the judge asks about the death penalty?’” he recalled asking. “I got no response.”

Ayala asked him to bring in a murder victim’s family so she could consider their feelings and he arranged the meeting.

Soon after, Williams said, Ayala told a community group she would not be seeking the death penalty. The group alerted the reporters, who called the office for confirmation. Caught off guard, Ayala’s staff scrambled.

“She and I were frantically calling victims” to give them a heads up on the news, Williams said.

The following morning, standing in front of the Orange County Courthouse with a cluster of television microphones clipped around her podium, Ayala held a press conference.

“I will not be seeking the death penalty in cases handled in my office,” she said.

While other prosecutors around the country had been known to avoid bringing death as a punishment,none had so boldly declared it as an across-the-board policy.

Ayala told the crowd that her decision was based on research, not her personal opinion. Twice in two years, Florida’s death penalty statute had been ruled unconstitutional, throwing cases into limbo. And the death penalty, she said, is not a deterrent to crime. With an average of 12 years from sentencing to execution, capital cases create long cycles of uncertainty. It costs the state $2.5 million more to prosecute a death penalty case than one in which prosecutors seek a life sentence, she said.

While some cheered Ayala’s stance — she would later be honored be honored by social justice groups — others found fault. Legal experts questioned how she could declare a blanket policy against the death penalty in all cases without considering individual circumstances, especially when it was part of Florida law. Others said the move didn’t take victims and their families into account.

Immediately after Ayala’s announcement, then-Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, took two dozen cases away from her office and transferred them to a prosecutor in neighboring Ocala. Critics called for her to be fired for dereliction of duty. A courthouse administrator wrote on Facebook that she should be “tarred and feathered, if not hung from a tree.”

University of Central Florida

Aubrey Jewett

Ayala’s announcement had come with no warning, said Aubrey Jewett, associate professor of political science at theUniversity of Central Florida. It wasn’t a major platform in her campaign and surprised even her own supporters. And Loyd had a long criminal history.

“If you’re going to try to sway public opinion, it was not the best case to take on,” Jewett said.

Reporters later unearthedtexts showing that a group linked to Soros had advised Ayala to hold the press conference. Skeptics wondered how much the Soros group had dictated her anti-death-penalty position after pouring money into her campaign.

Williams was angry. He felt that Ayala had never truly considered the feelings of the victim’s family she had met with, and that she’d just used them for optics. He quit Ayala’s office and moved to the state attorney’s office in Ocala in order to stay with the death penalty cases. He said Ayala retaliated by withholding case files and blocking him from using office space.

Republican opponent

Morenski Law

Kevin Morenski

Just four days after Ayala’s anti-death penalty announcement, Morenski, a Republican attorney in Orlando, filed paperwork to run for her office in 2020. He interpreted the declaration as “her telling surrounding counties, ‘If you want to commit murder, come to Orlando, because we’re not going to seek death.’”

Morenski, a former paramedic who earned his law degree from Florida State University and started his own criminal defense practice in 2013, discussed the 2020 possibilities with like-minded colleagues. They speculated that Ayala would seek higher office and that other prosecutors would seek her place, running as Democrats in the heavily left-leaning region.

Someone needs to run for Ayala’s seat as a Republican, Morenski’s colleagues thought. Morenski calculated that any prosecutor who ran would be seen as Ayala’s heir apparent. He could be the outsider, representing conservative values like personal responsibility and the fight against government overreach. He said he expects to win votes from individual blue-collar, rank-and-file cops.

That said, Morenski has his own thoughts on criminal justice reform. He believes many cases are overcharged and wants to give assistant state attorneys more autonomy to decide what charges to bring, which he said would improve efficiency.

Opioid cases should be handled in drug courts, he said. He would start a veterans’ court modeled on one in Florida’s Fifth Circuit. He also thinks the juvenile system needs more focus on education and rehabilitation. Though he has never worked in the state attorney’s office, he said there’s a sense that juvenile cases aren’t handled by the best attorneys.

”You’re on the way out if you get sent over to juvenile,” he said. “The files are sealed in all those cases, so you can’t do harm” and embarrass the department.

Morenski has raised only $580 so far — from himself. His campaign has been largely dormant, but he said he’ll ramp up efforts as the election nears.

Jewett said the Orlando area is staunchly Democratic and has become about 50% Hispanic, up from about 20% in 2000. It’s unlikely — but possible — that a Republican could win, he said.

“I can envision a scenario where a moderate Republican who downplayed the party and focused on victims, who was for the death penalty in egregious cases and common-sense judicial reform, with the main focus on bringing bad guys to justice — maybe they could win,” Jewett said.

Democratic opponent

In February, Williams declared his intention to run for Ayala’s seat. He’s already won the backing of a police union representing 10 counties, an early endorsement the union acknowledged was meant as a rebuke of Ayala.

Williams said that Ayala’s announcement today “made clear she’s not going anywhere for the next two years and she’s going to make policy changes that last even after she’s gone.”

“I’ve always been running against Aramis Ayala and the policies she’s enacted, not the person,” Williams said, adding that if Ayala runs for Congress it “would be a gargantuan task on her part.”

Williams called Morenski unqualified to lead the state attorney’s office and supervise its 180 prosecutors. Morenski called Williams a “very good attorney” but said he “doesn’t have the presence” to be the state attorney.

Williams so far has raised $52,598 from 121 contributors. If elected, he said he would advocate for assistant state attorneys, who earn about $40,000 a year to start and work 50 to 60 hours a week.

He wants to lower mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses. A misdemeanor marijuana charge, for example, can result in an offender losing his or her driver’s license for two years, which could prevent them from traveling to work.

Williams’ own father was convicted of embezzling $15 million from an employer, so he has seen both sides of the system, he said.

He has never witnessed an execution, but has considered the morality of the death penalty.

“This is the law in Florida,” Williams said. “If I am prosecuting anyone, especially a capital case, I am myself personally absolutely convinced of their guilt and that there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for every aggravating factor that we allege.”

It’s impossible not to get close to victims’ families during the yearslong process of trying cases, he said, but he is also obliged to respect the rights of defendants.

“At the end of the day, I don’t feel responsible if there’s a capital verdict, because the jury makes the decision,” he said. “I give them tools and information, and hopefully they follow the law and do what they think is right. And then, even if a jury decides that death is appropriate, a judge can override that decision in Florida.”

Williams and Morenski both expect Ayala’s chief assistant state attorney, Deborah Barra, to run — which they each said they heard from current staff in her office. Barra did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

She led an investigation of law enforcement officers’ actions after the Pulse nightclub shooting (officers were cleared of wrongdoing) and leads a panel of attorneys in Ayala’s office that reviews capital cases and considers bringing the death penalty.

Williams said Barra is an excellent prosecutor and a personal friend, but her decision to keep working under Ayala marked a clear difference between them.

“I couldn’t be part of the system that was going to blatantly not follow the law,” Williams said. Barra’s choice indicates that she must “either agree with policies that she was asked to carry out, or stay silent on her disagreement and go along to get along.”

The outlook

Ayala challenged Scott’s authority to take cases from her, but ultimately the state Supreme Court sided against her. She rescinded her policy and set up a panel that would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to seek the death penalty. Meanwhile, Scott cut $1.4 million from her budget.

The uproar over her death penalty stance obscured some of her office’s other key initiatives, she said in a recent email interview. Ayala established a unit to review possible cases of wrongful convictions, implemented bail reform that allows some defendants be released on their own recognizance and launched “Project No/No,” which would shield the names of minors referred to the state attorney’s office who aren’t arrested or charged.

Ayala said she also expanded training, taking prosecutors to visit jails, prisons, the booking and release center, and death row.

In Florida, which spends about $2.4 billion to incarcerate about 96,000 people per year, politicians on the left and right have been inching toward consensus on criminal justice reforms. But a bill that passed in the just-ended legislative session amounted only to “baby steps,” as the Southern Poverty Law Center put it.

The measure will eliminate a rule that leads more juveniles to be prosecuted as adults, raise the threshold for felony theft to $750 and make more occupational licencing available to ex-felons, but it won’t significantly reduce the number of people in prison.

Jewett thinks that despite polarization over the death penalty, there is still an appetite for legislative criminal justice reform in Florida.

The left, he said, is concerned about fairness, and the law-and-order right is concerned about costs.

“Those incentives can work together to find common-sense solutions to cut the prison population,” Jewett said, “while still keeping people safe.”